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Hunt for Savannah woman's rapist ongoing

Constance Cooper/Savannah Morning News Susan Kendrick Cash stands outside the West Gwinnett Street townhome where she was raped in 1985.

Susan Cash and local law enforcement have been waiting two decades for a break in her rape case.

Today, their biggest hope lies in a scientific breakthrough.

New technology has provided glimmers of hope over the years, but so far has not provided case-solving clues.

Today you meet Susan and learn how she, Savannah-Chatham police and others have sought resolution in her case. Her story is much like that of murder victim Patricia Tiedemann, another unsolved Savannah crime where the family and police hope advances in crime solving will one day put someone behind bars. (Patricia’s story appeared in the May 6 newspaper and is available at savannahnow.com.)

Susan Cash

Susan Kendrick Cash doesn’t like the word closure.

It implies turning a page, turning her back on the woman she’s become. The bedrock of that identity: The night almost 27 years ago when she was shot and violently raped under an abandoned townhouse on West Gwinnett Street.

Now 46 and a rape crisis counselor in Winder, Susan wants answers. She wants to know, with certainty, the name of the man who changed her life in the dark crawl space under that house. And she wants to make sure he can never do it again.

It doesn’t look like those answers will be forthcoming. A last-ditch effort by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations to retrieve the rapist’s DNA off the shirt Susan was wearing that night failed.

“We went to great lengths to attempt to gain any further scientific evidence or leads in that investigation,” said Savannah-Chatham police Sgt. Robert Gavin. “Unfortunately, there is no new evidence in the case.”

Absent DNA evidence, prosecution in Susan’s rape can’t move forward under Georgia law. The statute of limitations won’t allow a rape case to be tried 27 years after the crime unless there’s DNA.

“There is nothing further that we can do unless someone were to provide new evidence items that had been appropriately stored and had a chain of custody,” George Herrin, GBI’s Deputy Director over the Division of Forensic Sciences wrote in an email.

Susan is continuing her search for what she, with a tinge of sarcasm, calls the “holy rape kit” — samples taken from her body the night of the attack that now are missing.

GBI records indicate the bureau received swabs and slides from Susan’s rape kit July 3, 1985. Although the Coastal Regional Crime Lab can provide no record of those items being destroyed, Lab Manager Wally Campbell said he’s confident they were incinerated, victim of a storage space problem at the crime lab.

“We just got to where we couldn’t store any more,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.

Now the GBI returns all evidence to police, Campbell said.

“All evidence submitted to the lab is photographed and described,” Campbell wrote in an email. “It is also marked with a barcode (sic) and a secure electronic chain of custody is maintained on all items.”

A 2003 Georgia law now requires law enforcement agencies to keep DNA evidence in all felony cases until after the crime is solved and a sentence has been carried out.

The first investigation into Susan’s rape and assault was closed after just three weeks, according to a 1985 police report by Detective Harold Ragan, who has retired.

Susan says she looked at thousands of mug shots, even underwent hypnosis to try to give detectives a better description of the man who attacked her.

“There were several people that could have matched that description, the physical description,” she said. “I took it so seriously accusing somebody. I didn’t want to choose somebody and have it be the wrong person.”

For decades, Susan blamed herself for not being a better witness. In 2005, she was sharing her story with a group of Savannah-Chatham police officers, teaching a class on interacting with people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Moved by her story, Larry Branson, a captain at the time, had her case-reopened.

Mike Wilkins, then a lieutenant assigned to the department’s Special Victims Unit, combed the Savannah Police Department’s archives and found the clothing Susan had worn the night of the attack, her fingerprints taken after the assault, and a roll of undeveloped film that turned out to be crime-scene photos.

The clothes were sent to the GBI for testing and went through several DNA screens before this most recent test, which isolated for male chromosomes. Investigators hoped the latest test would pick up a genetic imprint the rapist left on Susan’s shirt when he led her to the abandoned home. But the screening failed to pick up any DNA at all, Gavin said.

After finding out last month the test had failed, Susan said she felt like she’d “been kicked in the gut.”

“The last seven years have been tremendously challenging,” she said. “I’ve been given the chance to advocate for myself where I never had an advocate.”

Susan said her quest for answers badly strained her marriage, which ended in 2009 after 18 years. Her ex-husband couldn’t understand her zeal, she said, and didn’t want to re-visit the past.

It was July 1, 1985. Susan was 19 years old, fresh from a tiny town — Thompson, population 7,000 — attending cosmetology school in Savannah. It was nearly midnight. She thought someone was in her apartment and rushed to a pay phone nearby to call her sister. A man walked by and asked directions to Bolton Street, a stupid question, Susan thought. It was just a few blocks away. She told him she didn’t know and went back to her conversation. He walked a few paces, snapped his fingers and spun on his heels.

He stuck the gun under her shirt, grabbed her by the shoulder and led her to 203 West Gwinnett St. He forced her to take off her pants and underwear.

“The next thing was hearing that pop, and hearing somebody scream,” Susan said.

She was the one screaming.

After shooting her, Susan’s attacker forced her to crawl under the house, where she said he violently raped her for several hours.

She remembers the sharp ache of the gunshot wound; the way a piece of tin she was lying on creaked as he raped her; his huge, sweaty hands; the cruel and intimate way he spoke to her; and, above all else, his rancid smell.

“I just sort of mentally checked out,” she said.

Susan doesn’t know how much time passed before he finally left, warning her not to move, telling her he’d be back.

“He said he wanted to keep me under the house for days,” Susan said. “I got very cold, clammy. I was going through my head everybody I loved, and I prayed that if I didn’t make it, they’d find me very early on because I did not want my parents wondering what happened to me. I didn’t want to be a bag of bones under an abandoned house.”

Naked and terrified, Susan crawled out and climbed over a 4-foot wall and an 8-foot fence, up three flights of stairs and into an unlocked apartment. It was about 3:30 a.m.

“I can even remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to wake anyone up.’”

The men who lived in the apartment were acquaintances of Susan’s. They wrapped her in a sheet and called police.

Susan still wonders what happened to that sheet, to her purse and to her 1984 Thompson High School class ring.

According to police reports, detectives only recovered Susan’s clothes and some scissors from her purse.

With nothing more they can do for now, detectives are closing Susan’s file, in part, so she can get a copy of it under the Georgia Open Records Act and review the investigation for herself. But they’re holding on to Susan’s clothes in hopes that science will one day catch the faint genetic imprint of a rapist’s hand on a 19-year-old’s shoulder.

“I always have hope,” Gavin said. “Who knows in five years what new science, or in 10 years, what new science has.”